mthew
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Lichens
Always take a look at the sticks and limbs that come down from old trees. There’s a lot of stuff going on up there, out of sight, and breakages provide a great opportunity to see what. This piece of an oak has at least two nice lichens on it. Star Rosette Lichen (Physcia stellaris). Rosette…
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Raptor Wednesday
This Red-tailed Hawk is “chonk,” as the kids say. The bird took off a few minutes later.
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Splotch
I remember when I went to Montreal some years ago in the fall and saw lots of maples, silver especially, and lots and lots of dark splotches on the leaves. These, however, are examples from right here in Brooklyn. This is Black Tar Spot (Rhytisma acerinum), an ascomycete fungi. It’s cosmetic, not existential.
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Perseverance
Yesterday, with temps in the low 40s and windchill pushing the feel down into the 30s, a tiny ant and a Margined Calligrapher were both working it in a dandelion.
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Thryothorus ludovicianus
Not an atypical look at a wren in typical habitat. Do you see the underside of the Carolina’s tail? Some five minutes’ vigil, however, ended when the bird popped up to the top of the tangle of thicket whose floor they were rummaging in.
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Oops
Insert your action painting jokes here, my friends. This is a dolled-up image of a Red-tailed Hawk poop strike across the hood of a car. …and the original. Big bird, big drop. Probably much more than you want to know about raptor mutes.
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Yes, It’s Actually This Orange
This sure jumps out at you, doesn’t it? Orange Peel Fungus (Aleuria aurantia). A couple of patches had been recorded in Green-Wood by others on iNaturalist and I just had to see it in person. I was not disappointed. With the library, my main source of books, shut down for months and now hard to…
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More Cooper’s Hawks
An Accipter presents a distinctive silhouette. With a longer tail and a narrower body than a Buteo (like a Red-tailed Hawk), they jump out at you. This one allowed me to get on the right side of the sun. Like yesterday’s specimen, this is an adult Cooper’s. (See here and here for a recent immature…
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Raptor Wednesday
Blue Jays and Nuthatches are a reliable source of alarm when a Cooper’s is in the hood. This one was out in the open with prey when I followed the shrieks, but soon retreated to the foliage of a beech. The raptor was plucking. A few of the prey’s feathers fell down to the road…
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Pods
Juncos and Goldfinches eating the tiny seeds of the sweetgum tree. All over the ground under several old trees. In hand with one of the pods. And now for something relatively different: Kentucky coffeetree pods. So named because these seeds were once turned into an ersatz coffee. Before that, did some extinct megafauna crunch these…
Backyard and Beyond 